Can AI Write Your Psychotherapist's Notes?
A working talk on evidence-based psychotherapy, the session as the active ingredient of treatment, and what ambient listening systems preserve of what happens in the consulting room.
The event
Pint of Science is an annual international festival that brings working researchers out of the lab and into the pub for one short, plain-language talk and a beer with the audience. The Basel edition on 20 May 2026, hosted at the Novartis Pavillon, ran under the theme The Future of Medicine: What Comes Next? (event page).
Three talks shared the evening:
- Benjamin Kasenda (University of Basel) — The Learning Hospital: Turning Routine Cancer Care into Discovery, on hospitals as learning health systems where routine care data feeds back into personalised oncology.
- Caroline Boulton (Novartis, Global Program Head Malaria) — Treatment of Malaria: What Comes Next?, on why new antimalarials are still needed despite vaccines and how drug resistance is shaping the next generation of therapies.
- Ronan Zimmermann (MHIRA) — Can AI Write Your Psychotherapist's Notes?, on what we know about why psychotherapy works, how little of the live session ever reaches the chart, and what changes when the session itself can become part of the record.
This page covers the third talk.
The argument, in one minute
Psychotherapy is, by the standards of clinical medicine, an effective treatment for a wide range of mental disorders. Its active ingredient is not a molecule but a trained, situational craft: human interaction unfolding in real time. The trouble is that this interaction rarely leaves the room. Documentation preserves a fraction of the session — enough to bill, audit, and continue care, but not enough to study the moment-to-moment work that does the actual healing.
Ambient listening systems make a different kind of persistence possible. Transcripts, structured summaries, and longitudinal session records are starting to be technically feasible at the point of care. That opens new ground for supervision, outcome research, and patient safety, and changes what a clinical record of a session can be.
What the talk covers
- Why psychotherapy works: outcome research and effect sizes across diagnostic groups
- Where the effect lives: interaction as a trained craft, not a script
- How therapists actually decide what to do in the next ninety seconds
- Why session notes systematically under-capture the session
- What ambient listening turns into a clinical record
- One session, multiple representations — intake, session note, supervision, outcome
- Where MHIRA sits in this picture, and what is genuinely still open
Slides and materials
The full slide deck is available to read in the browser or download as a PDF. It is designed to be read on its own — the deck is structured as an editorial argument rather than a list of talking points.
Continue the conversation
For questions about the talk, the research it draws from, or MHIRA itself, get in touch — or read more of the work behind it.